English

The Discrepancy Between tau and e+e- Spectral Functions Revisited and the Consequences for the Muon Magnetic Anomaly

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2014-11-20 v3

Abstract

We revisit the procedure for comparing the pi pi spectral function measured in tau decays to that obtained in e+e- annihilation. We re-examine the isospin-breaking corrections using new experimental and theoretical input, and find improved agreement between the tau- --> pi- pi0 nu_tau branching fraction measurement and its prediction using the isospin-breaking-corrected e+e- --> pi+pi- spectral function, though not resolving all discrepancies. We recompute the lowest order hadronic contributions to the muon g-2 using e+e- and tau data with the new corrections, and find a reduced difference between the two evaluations. The new tau-based estimate of the muon magnetic anomaly is found to be 1.9 standard deviations lower than the direct measurement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0906.5443,
  title  = {The Discrepancy Between tau and e+e- Spectral Functions Revisited and the Consequences for the Muon Magnetic Anomaly},
  author = {M. Davier and A. Hoecker and G. Lopez Castro and B. Malaescu and X. H. Mo and G. Toledo Sanchez and P. Wang and C. Z. Yuan and Z. Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0906.5443},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J. C; (v2): Revised version with improved and uniform treatment of tau and e+e- data with HVPTools and a few minor bug fixes; (v3): Final version accepted for publication